“I love to serve whole burnt aubergines in this way, where the punchy sauce is spooned over them, covering them generously like sauce blankets. This is quite a substantial vegetarian main so I would serve it with something light, like the Herby Leafy Salad.” – Noor Murad

“Busy little monkeys will love this tasty, crispy snack on the run. (Just don’t mention that they’re packed with vegetables!)” - Nabula El Mourid

It might surprise some to learn that tomatoes feature in regional Chinese cooking; especially with eggs as a quick, easy, comforting topping for steamed rice or for wide wheat noodles. Yum. This is one of those classic, home-style Chinese dishes…

"This recipe came from our neighbour Mona, who grew up in Hama in Syria, her childhood home built along the river. A wonderful cook, she would make this layered dish whenever she came to one of our gatherings. It has lived on in our spreads ever since." - Karima Hazim Chatila & Siline Tabbouch

A real meal-in-a-bowl, you can easy scale this recipe up, increasing everything by a half or even doubling it. As the soup freezes well, you can then have plenty to pull out for an easy meal when time runs short to cook dinner. We like roasting our beets separately, adding them to the soup near the end of cooking...

There’s a new way to cook lamb shanks in town; trussed up in paper. The idea is, the baking paper packaging traps all the juices and steam inside, keeping the shanks super-succulent and tasty as they cook. We don’t think you could possibly over-cook these as there is no way they can possibly dry out...

Welcome to Fellah Köfte. With roots in Turkish and MIddle Eastern cuisine, it’s a humble kind of a dish using everyday staples that would traditionally have been super-cheap and constantly on hand. Depending on what burghul and semolina cost in your vicino, it’s still pretty cheap to make and if you can get Turkish pepper paste all the better…

Hands up who has memories of their Mum making shepherd’s pie? Us too. Ours minced the cold roast lamb using a hefty metal mincer with a crank handle. It screwed onto the edge of the bench or dining table and made short work of reducing the lamb to teeny tiny bits; yes, kids, there was life before food processors…

Why use the Italian name for this dish? Because when translated, ribollita means ‘reboiled’ and we don’t know about you but a dish with that name would not exactly entice us to the dinner table. “What’s for dinner, Mum?” “Reboiled!!” “Ooh…

Osso buco is a cut of veal and a traditional Lombardian meat stew; the word means ‘bone with a hole.” The osso buco we commonly see is beef and not veal, which is significantly more expensive and daintier than beef osso buco, which can be humungous…

“This is a lovely and easy dish to enjoy pazı (chard), grown mostly in the northwest, Black Sea, Marmara, Aegean and Mediterranean regions. Its gently tart flavour is delicious here. These large leaves are also used for making pazı sarması (rolled chard leaves with aromatic rice…

If you want a virtuous, nutritious soup, or you just want to make 300g of mince stretch a long way… you’ll love this Turkish-inspired number. It’s also great when you’re looking for an alternative to the ubiquitous veggie, barley and chicken (or ham) meal-in-a-bowl that turns up…

Got a crowd to feed? Here’s your gig. We figure it’s not worth cooking up this style of a long-braised beefy storm for the average nuclear family but if 2.7 diners is all you’re mustering, just halve everything and be prepared for leftovers. No biggie. The cooked meat will freeze…

Oh. Don’t like lentils? You’re missing out. They’re seriously delicious and are an easy, healthy and cheap way to get filled up. Until you start pairing them with eggs of course, and then everything goes to heck in the budgeting department…

“Sweet spices in a ragù are typical of northern Italian cooking, and they are surprisingly perfect with meats like lamb, beef and game. The star anise and cinnamon lend sweetness and depth, while the tomato, red wine and rosemary bring this back to more recognisable territory…

Holy banging bangers, Batman; can sausages actually get better than their lovely, snag-y self, or what? We reckon they can and here’s Exhibit A… our sausage ragu. Perfect for tossing through pasta, it’s easy to make and is brilliant during these…

You don’t have to travel in Turkey very far before encountering this dish; it’s popularly served as a mezze. And – here’s a quick language lesson – ‘mercimek’, Turkish for the red lentils, is pronounced ‘mer-ji-mek.’…

This type of rustic soup, often topped with shreds of the region’s famous radicchio, is popular in the Veneto region of Italy in winter. An example of cucina povera, literally the ‘cooking of the poor’, it speaks to a frugal approach and using what you’ve damned well got on hand…

Lamb. Soup. North African flavours. I. Am. So. Here. For. These. A soupy-stew with a lot going for it, we’re in love with the lamby, lentil-y, aromatic, nourishing goodness that is harira. Wiki suggests it can be eaten as a ‘light snack’ but this flour-thickened version…

Braising is one of the cornerstone techniques of cooking and once you understand how it works, you can go forth and apply the same, basic method to any suited ingredient, or cut of meat, with confidence. Braising is a wet method of cooking, and meat-wise…